May 29 (Bloomberg) -- About 2.1 billion people, or almost
one-third of the world’s population, were obese or overweight
last year, researchers estimated after examining data from 183
countries.

The estimated number of overweight or obese people almost
tripled from 857 million in 1980, according to the analysis
published today in The Lancet. The heaviest country was the
U.S., accounting for about 13 percent of the world’s obese
people, followed by China and India, which together represent 15
percent, according to the study funded by the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation.

“Since 1980, no country has made significant progress in
reducing the rates of people being overweight or obese,”
Christopher Murray, the study author, said in an e-mail.
“Obesity is now a major public health epidemic in both the
developed and the developing world.”

Obesity can raise the risk of diabetes, osteoarthritis,
heart disease and cancer, among other health-threatening
conditions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. Being overweight was estimated to have caused
3.4 million deaths worldwide, said Murray, director of the
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of
Washington in Seattle.

“Countries need to be looking at how they communicate
effectively both what people eat and how much they should be
eating,” Murray said. “Because what we’ve been doing up until
now isn’t working. Strategies to tackle obesity need to address
both physical activity, total caloric intake and the different
foods we eat.”

BMI Measure

The researchers analyzed data from international surveys on
obesity that included height and weight as well as national
reports and medical research. They based their analysis on body
mass index, a measure of weight and height.

A woman 5 feet, 4 inches tall weighing 175 pounds would
have a BMI of 30. A BMI of 30 or more is considered obese, while
a BMI of 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight, according to the
U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Worldwide prevalence of obesity and overweight rose by 28
percent for adults and by 47 percent for children from 1980 and
2013, the researchers found. The number of men who were obese
over that period time grew to 37 percent from 29 percent, while
the number of women rose to 38 percent from 30 percent.

“The rise in obesity among children is especially
troubling in so many low- and middle-income countries,” Marie
Ng, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of Global
Health at the University of Washington, said in a statement.
“We know that there are severe downstream health effects from
childhood obesity, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes,
and many cancers.”

50% of Obese

More than half of the world’s 671 million obese people live
in the U.S., China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt,
Germany, Pakistan and Indonesia. During the more than three
decades studied, the largest increase in obesity rates were in
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Honduras and Bahrain for women and
New Zealand, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. for men.

In Kuwait, Kiribati, the Federated States of Micronesia,
Libya, Qatar and Samoa more than 50 percent of the women are
obese, while in Tonga, more than half of men and women are
obese, the paper showed.

The one “bright spot,” Murray said, was that obesity and
overweight rates aren’t rising as fast as they were in the past
in high-income countries.

Obesity increased the most from 1992 to 2002, but has
slowed in the past decade, particularly in developed countries,
according to the analysis.